Post by Asher Packman

In 1905, Rilke moved to Meudon, France, to take a job as the secretary of sculptor Auguste Rodin. When Rilke told Rodin that he had not been writing lately, Rodin's advice was to go to the zoo (the Jardin des Plantes) and look at an animal until he “saw it”. Stories suggest that Rilke spent as many as three consecutive weeks, from open to close, studying a panther... . From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted that it no longer holds anything anymore. To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand bars, and behind the bars, nothing. The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride which circles down to the tiniest hub is like a dance of energy around a point in which a great will stands stunned and numb. Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise without a sound — then a shape enters, slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders, reaches the heart, and dies. . (Translated by Robert Bly)